View Fed. Chairman Ben Bernanke Address at Princeton University on C-SPAN. The video is just over 1 hour long.
The address talks about the role of economic research, engineering, and management in the efforts of the Fed to counteract the recent deep recession and financial system near meltdown.
The comment card that he mentions is on the PCCC web site. There is a place to say what you think Elizabeth Warren’s top priorities should be. Besides choosing three items from a list, I also wrote in:
Stop allowing Wall Street Ponzi schemes to dupe the public. Claiming sophisticated investors should protect themselves, when the Wall St purveyors of this garbage know they are lying to bamboozle even sophisticated investors should not be a get out of jail free card.
If the direct video and the link above don’t satisfy you, here is the YouTube Link To Al Franken’s video.
And now for a really hilarious interview by Jon Stewart with King Abdullah II of Jordan. 😉
Made you look, I hope. It was a serious and good interview, not hilarious. I deserve ten strokes with a wet noodle for that deception.
Jon Stewart points out just how new the ideas are in the Pledge on America.
The Worcester T & G published its usual political cartoon by Hitch.
George Bush nearly sank the capitalist economy into a depression that could have exceeded the Great Depression and Barack Obama rescued it. I guess that’s all the proof you need to know that Obama hates capitalism.
Has Hitch got a crack in his dark colored glasses that he uses when a Democrat is President after giving up his Bush era rose colored glasses?
See, it is fine with the voters to be honest about the witchcraft you once practiced. The sin is to say you are a Christian and deny that you ever were a Muslim.
The article ‘Cookies’ Cause Bitter Backlash in The Wall Street Journal is a must read if you are a computer user. (If you aren’t a computer user, how are you reading this blog post? 🙂 ). If you use an IPhone, you might want to read this twice.
Here is a little teaser from the article:
Another suit, filed earlier this month, accuses Fox Entertainment Group and the American idol.com website of using a new kind of cookie—known as a Flash cookie—that can “re-spawn” tracking files that users have deleted, without users’ knowledge.
This is the first I have read about flash cookies. Wouldn’t you know Fox would be involved? By the way, who is it that just bought The Wall Street Journal?
Update on October 25, 2010
I found the following article that was released on October 20, 2010 from PC Magazine.
Flash Cookie Cop: Protect Yourself from Insidious Flash Cookies
I am going to check it out. Oops!, it is not free. Costs $8.00. Maybe I’ll wait until Firefox builds in the flash cop for free.
Update October 26, 2010
To fix this problem for free, visit the Adobe Flash Settings Manager. At that site you will be able to manage the flash cookies. Go through all the tabs and delete cookies that you wish to delete and change settings to the way you prefer them.
I was talking to Gordon Gekko today. He aired his complaints about the anti-business attitude of the Democrats.
I had such a sweet deal going, It was the Ponzi scheme called financial derivatives. My friends and I were raking in billions of dollars a year. I even had the victims of the Ponzi scheme believe they were getting rich too. Everybody was just so ecstatic.
Then comes the Democrats to burst my little bubble with such foolish thoughts that Ponzi schemes are somehow dishonest. They want to make laws and rules that will hinder my business in the future.
Don’t they realize how important people like me are to economic growth and the recovery of jobs?
Why, if I could just get another giant Ponzi scheme going, we’d all feel rich again. Perhaps we can even exceed the heights of just a few years ago. Do I ever long for those good old days.
I just don’t understand why those Socialist, anti-American Democrats don’t like rich business people like me.
The article A Page or Two from the Tea Party Book had some good points with which I could wholeheartedly agree.
Merely saving the House and Senate is not enough. … We must increase our majority in the House by ten votes and take two or three additional seats in the Senate.
I couldn’t quite agree with some of the pages to be taken from the Tea Party Book, especially the ones about negative campaigning. My two responses to the article contain thoughts that I have expressed on this web site before and in many other places.
My first response was titled A Positive Kind Of Negative Campaigning.
Negative campaigning works really well for the underdog. For the assumed leader, not so much.
Just ask Senator Martha Coakley from Massachusetts and retired, under-dog politician Scott Brown who ran against her. What? Did you say it’s Senator Brown and Coakley went back to her job as Attorney General. I thought that was just a nightmare. You mean that really happened?
It is easy for the underdog, out-of-power to attack the programs of the assumed leaders and the in-power. There are real disappointments in any actual program and great promise in ones that have not been tried and tested. Scare tactics are not so easy to use against the underdog and out-of-power unless everything is going just great – and even then there are problems. Just ask President Al Gore.
I suggest positive kind of negative campaigning and ads. You keep driving home the reasons why your programs are necessary. You keep driving home how much better things will be when you do even more than what you have done so far. In passing you can mention the negative consequences of not marching boldly ahead. You can talk about what happens when you don’t have the courage to face the future and want to return to the false safety of an imagined past. You don’t even have to mention the other party nor the other candidates, or not hardly mention them. You might make it clear in the way you describe the good and bad alternatives that the ones that are good are yours and the ones that are bad are theirs.
If you cannot come up with a slew of positive reasons for your being in office and remaining in office, then perhaps you don’t really belong in office. People who really believe in the principles are disheartened by weak kneed defenses of those principles. Anything less than a vigorous defense of the positive cuts your chances of winning in three ways. 1. It emboldens your enemies. 2. It doesn’t attract many uncommitted. 3. It disheartens your supporters.
If you still can’t muster the strength to get up on your hind legs and fight, then you are the problem as much as the Republicans are. If the grass-roots have to teach the politicians how to do it, then teach we must.
With this positive kind of negative campaigning, you can win and even feel proud of the way you won. You can feel proud that you didn’t have to destroy politics to save it.
My second response was titled Pretend This Campaign Is A Job Interview.
If you can pretend this campaign is a job interview, then you can imagine the interviewer has asked you what are you greatest strengths. After you answer the question, they ask you what are your greatest weaknesses.
The savvy candidate says that the greatest weakness was not pushing hard enough for his superior programs. Another weakness was allowing the people who did not know how to run the country to water down your programs for the sake of bipartisanship. Another weakness was letting the minority threaten you without your standing up to the threat. When you have the strength, a bully will back down when confronted. But, you have learned from your mistakes. Tomorrow is a new day, and a revitalized candidate will hold onto her strengths and overcome those aforementioned weaknesses.
What the voters want to see is confidence that appears well justified. I don’t think the phrase, “I am confident that if I appease the Republicans just a little more, then we’ll get more done.”
If the Democrats appear to be backsliding a little from their program of the last few years, it just adds fuel to the idea that they were wrong and the Republicans have been right. Even for the Democrats who never really believed in the program in the first place, they ought to realize that there is no reason to vote for a faux Republican when they can have a real one. If you don’t go down fighting for your team, you will go down anyway.
In The Tax-Cut Racket, Paul Krugman almost gets to the point I am making about this tax cut war.
Almost everyone agrees that raising taxes on the middle class in the middle of an economic slump is a bad idea, unless the effects are offset by other job-creation programs — and Republicans are blocking those, too.
If he could only get to the point of explaining that raising the taxes of the wealthy in the middle of an economic slump is not a bad idea if the effects are offset by other job-creation programs, then he will reach the epiphany that I have reached.
I am afraid that the previous paragraph’s cut and paste operation that I did on Krugman’s statement is too complicated for people to figure out on their own. Someone in the administration has to come out and actually say it explicitly.